breadcrumb schema
Also called: breadcrumblist schema, breadcrumb structured data, breadcrumb markup, breadcrumb rich result
Breadcrumb schema (BreadcrumbList structured data) is JSON-LD markup that describes a page's place in your site hierarchy as an ordered list of ListItems, each carrying a name, URL, and position. Google reads it to show that breadcrumb trail in place of the raw URL in a search result.
Breadcrumbs are the “Home > Services > Technical SEO” trail near the top of a page. The schema is the machine-readable version of that trail, so search engines and AI answer engines can reconstruct where a page sits without guessing from the URL.
How the markup is built
A BreadcrumbList wraps an itemListElement array. Each entry is a ListItem with three fields: position (an integer starting at 1), name (the visible label), and item (the page URL). Order the list from the top of the hierarchy down to the current page.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "BreadcrumbList",
"itemListElement": [
{ "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Services",
"item": "https://seobro.com/services/" },
{ "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Technical SEO",
"item": "https://seobro.com/services/technical-seo/" }
]
}Google’s guidance: include at least two items, leave out the bare domain root, and the final page’s item URL is optional (Google falls back to the containing page’s URL). Represent the path a user actually follows, not the folder nesting of the URL. A single page can carry more than one BreadcrumbList when it belongs to several paths (say, a product filed under two categories). Keep the JSON-LD matched to a visible breadcrumb on the page, since Google’s rule is that structured data should reflect content users can actually see.
How it affects your traffic
On desktop, a valid breadcrumb trail can replace the raw URL string in the search snippet, which reads cleaner and gives context for deep category and service pages. In January 2025 Google stopped showing breadcrumbs in mobile results and now shows only the domain there, so on mobile the markup does more of the quiet work of telling crawlers (and AI answer engines) how your pages nest, since the visible cue is gone. Missing, broken, or mismatched BreadcrumbList is one of the structured-data errors we surface in a Technical SEO audit, alongside orphaned pages and inconsistent internal linking, so the fix usually ships as part of a broader crawl-and-hierarchy cleanup rather than on its own.
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